Oh, they’ll absolutely still pull that shit, but there are a ton of medical practices that have a separate waiting list for Medicaid patients because they only accept a certain percentage of their patients being on Medicaid. UHC will still leave you with the bill, but having Medicaid can make it difficult to even see the specialist in the first place regardless of how much it will cost.

Oh, a bunch of us know, but because of gerrymandering and the ignorance of the larger populace, there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.

I actually purchased Thor: Ragnarok so that I could watch it repeatedly. I love it so much. I’m pretty sure about 90% of that movie was ad-libbed by Taika just giving them a vague outline of what the scene is supposed to be about and then just setting the actors loose to improv to their heart’s content.

Edit: Also, watching Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) absolutely kill it as the most exasperated evil queen is one of my favorite things in a movie ever.

They’ll probably need specialty pulmonology care later in life and a lot of public insurance plans either don’t cover it, or the waiting lists for Medicaid patients are obscene. At least UHC would get you onto the shorter waiting list.

Also, many of them are ineligible to become actual firefighters after their release from prison due to their criminal record. I would be slightly more okay with this system if it translated into a guaranteed position as a firefighter following release if they agree to go to an area in need like in smaller communities that have trouble recruiting firefighters.

I have interpreted it less as “the hobbits are less powerful”, and more as “what would a powerful hobbit even want?”.

If a hobbit had all the power in Middle Earth, they would have an amazingly cozy hobbit hole with the best food and their parties and garden would be the envy of every hobbit and probably some elves and men. Hobbits don’t really have much interest in conquest, and their definition of dominance includes being well-liked or admired by those they dominate.

That is an insult to Babish.

My apartment at school is a couple blocks from the hospital. I can hear the air ambulance helicopter take off and land. It’s profoundly less annoying than the active railway near the apartment in the other direction.

There is no reasonable way to eliminate all noise and I can guarantee that there are sources of noise that are louder and more pervasive/frequent than aircraft that you could focus this ire on. If someone is really so sensitive as to suffer immense harm from the noise of aircraft in their area, they should not live in that area.

Before you start on some tangent about how small, rural communities have aircraft noise as well as large cities, I would like to inform you that those small airports can be a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our communities. I have helped care for a patient that had to be flown to our hospital in a small airplane from a rural community about 500 miles away because an air ambulance helicopter couldn’t make the distance and a ground ambulance would have been too slow. Putting too many restrictions on small airfields, especially in remote communities could very easily cause actual fatalities, not just disruption or distress.

If you’re talking about the constant noise from bit mining operations and the like, I’d agree with you. But having grown up very close to a US military testing airfield, I disagree with the assertion that aircraft noise is anything more than a nuisance. Throughout the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a place where squadrons of C-130’s would do take-off and landing drills over my neighborhood. While it was irksome, like all aircraft, they were limited to flying during certain times of day, excluding emergencies, just like personal or private aircraft are. I suffered no permanent harm from it, and to be honest, our neighbors blasting loud music all the time and late into the night was more of a problem than the aircraft.

I think you are focusing far too much and placing entirely unwarranted importance on this issue, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. It will win you no favors to burn any good will you have on this issue when there are others that are much more important problems.

Noise is not violence in the same way that murder is violence. And if your issue is them flying near residential areas, that increases the likelihood of another, uninvolved, innocent person being injured or killed in the crash. As I said in my other comment, violence inflicted on bystanders is abhorrent and not acceptable. Noise is a nuisance, murder is a permanent bad “solution” to a temporary minor problem in this case.

The rich people flying their own aircraft are almost always flying very small prop-planes that make less noise than the average semi-truck. The oligarch-parasites are never flying their own planes, so taking down an aircraft that they are in is going to result in multiple casualties of innocent people just trying to make a living. The only pilots who don’t go into debt to get their license are military veterans who just paid for their training with years of their lives and a decent chance of racking up some not-insignificant PTSD.

I can see where you are coming from on this, but you’re just wrong on this one. Luigi had the right idea by causing zero ancillary casualties and preventing harm from coming to anyone who was not his intended target. Any act of violence that doesn’t take that into account is just expanding on the already pervasive suffering in our society. As an EMT, I helped care for a toddler that had their distal femur obliterated by a stray shot in a drive-by shooting. I was in the ER, so I never found out what ended up happening to them after we stabilized them and sent them off to the trauma and orthopedic surgeons, but with my medical education since then, my best guess is an above-the-knee amputation because the growth plate was destroyed. So I’ve seen innocent bystander casualties before, in person, and there is no excuse for causing that kind of suffering. The impact that can come from inflicting damage on innocent bystanders is profound and no one with remotely decent virtues could inflict that kind of pain intentionally.

Oh goodness, you’re the one folks have been talking about. I am suddenly much less confused.

To my knowledge, I don’t think you have to have a membership to get food at Costco. I’m pretty sure the optical shop and pharmacy are available to non-members as well.

There’s obviously mark-ups at a stadium. I was offering an explanation for why the water bottle was more than the fountain drink, relatively speaking.

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Tap water is supposed to be free in most places in the USA.

To be fair, those are 100% beef hotdogs that they sell at a loss. There’s a reason someone suggested increasing the price despite being met with threats of violence from the CEO (president?) in response for that suggestion.